The company, which connects customers to local floral shops and got its start at the University of Chicago Booth school, sends photos of arrangements for approval prior to delivery. It will even send photos of the recipient with the flowers.

More fundamentally, the service aims to increase customer satisfaction by showing posts by individual shops of arrangements featuring flowers they have on hand. That's contrary to the traditional model of flower-buying in which florists are expected to replicate bouquets advertised nationally in stock photos.

Based in Los Angeles, BloomNation won the New Venture Challenge at Booth, got funding from Chicago Ventures, and has attracted millions in investments from Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital and CrunchFund.

“Investors are looking at marketplace businesses like ours and Airbnb that connect you by jumping over big middlemen,” said co-founder David Daneshgar. “Almost every investor we talked to had gone through a disappointing experience ordering flowers online and going through brokers.”

Daneshgar was studying at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business when he created the company in 2011 with buddies Farbod Shoraka and Gregg Weisstein.

He’d met the other partners as an undergraduate at University of California, Berkeley. Shoraka, BloomNation’s chief executive officer, was a fellow student, while Weisstein attended University of California, Santa Barbara.

At one time a nationally ranked player who taught a class in poker, Daneshgar entered a casino tournament to win the $30,000 needed to build the business’ first website.

BloomNation has signed up about 2,000 florists, including 18 in Chicago. It moves into Boston and New York later this summer. The company won’t disclose revenue.

Anna Held Floral Studio, 5557 N. Sheridan, joined the network last November to showcase its designs.

The result was a 20 percent increase in holiday business in 2013 over 2012, said head designer Laura Daluga. Sales for Valentine’s Day also were up 20 percent this year compared to 2013.

Daluga said the change in marketing allowed the store to cut a clerk position and add a designer at higher pay.

“We spent so much less time running around, procuring flowers to do custom orders,” she said. “Now, we have images on our website of our work.”

The shop had previously given a 20- to 30-percent discount to the wire services, said Daluga, 30, a fourth-generation florist.

Ninety percent of the price of each arrangement goes to the florist. BloomNation gets 10 percent, paying the 3-percent credit card company processing fee from its share.

“We were working so hard for pennies,” she said. “The people my age are doing so much to try and grow the industry and to take it back from the corporations.”

Floral startups are looking for ways to take share from services like 1-800-Flowers, Teleflora and FTD, known as wire services.

Many florists have complained about the dominance of wire services, which charge transfer fees and require florists to provide products at a discount, said Peter J. Moran, chief executive officer at the Society of American Florists, a nationwide trade association based in Alexandria, Va.

“Tech is definitely a big component of the florist business now, and there’s lots of different applications out there. Everybody’s trying to figure out what works the best,” he said. “It’s definitely a different approach, and time will tell whether it’s an application that gets broad appeal.”